SWIMMING THE GAUNTLET

Each year, as the long summer days draw to an end, the Atlantic coast of Florida becomes the setting for a strange phenomenon. Along the beaches lined with high-rise apartment blocks, it looks as though an oil spill has hit. But these dark slicks, which can be several miles long, don’t behave like a normal spill. They swirl and seethe. Here and there, the sea surface shivers.

The mullet runs are easy to see through the crystal-clear waters of the sunshine state.

“We call it nervous water,” says underwater photographer, Michael Patrick O’Neill, which is apt, given what’s going on beneath the surface. This is no petrochemical catastrophe but a natural spectacle, created by the arrival of so many fish they turn the water black. Enormous shoals of striped mullet attract a horde of predators. There are dolphins, blacktip sharks, spinner sharks, and giant silver fish called tarpon, which can equal the sharks in size and power. Together,